Well, I guess I know what I am going to min-max for my next playthrough; let's try sword and board.
But here's my real question to you guys... how many of you guys have actually tried pushing the sword/board to the limits?
If you have, post your builds, the party set up, and what your game plan was both macro and micro.
I can't tell you exactly what's going to make it work because so far I have only learned what doesn't work lol.
1. Cleric with shield is weak. You are AP starved as it is. By throwing away 1 AP here and there casting support spells at the back you will have trouble getting into the fray.
2. Heavy armor + shield means the guy will move slowly. Might want to get multiple movement skills such phoenix dive, battering ram etc to help yourself position.
3. The best shield I found gives me 75 physical armor. In comparison the heaviest armor I found gives me 85 physical armor. The boost is significant and it does have the potential to overtake your health pool so you might want to consider putting more points on physical armor as opposed to vitality. Obviously you are not gonna have much magic armor so the weakness is you will get obliterated by high damage spells and get status effects easily. Also, there is like only one spell to restore physical armor right now (fortify) and it belongs to a rather lackluster school (geomancer). It restores a lot in one go but your sustain compared to a health build with a party full of healers is still weaker and less versatile.
4. The Pawn talent is good -> you don't want to waste any AP moving two steps to whack a target with your short 1H stick.
5. Your DPS sucks real hard compared to say, rogues. So you might want to just manipulate the AI into wasting time on the shield user as opposed to getting out there yourself. By manipulating AI I mean abuse line of sight, smoke, sneak, invisbility etc so they have no one to focus but the shield. Then you can depend on your party to attack from a distance or burst them down with adrenaline fueled backstabbers.
1. The solution is to go Elf, but in this play through I am going dwarf for petrify.
2. Blitz, Battering Ram, Adrenaline Rush, Haste, Rage (what dodge?), Favorable Wind (not going to self cast that), Phoenix Dive.
3. I am going to stack magic armor first and foremost because that's what is going to litter the field and is a potential high source of damage. A shield will offer, as you pointed out, anywhere from 75-111 (I think that's level 7-8 though). So head piece, shield, leggings, sabatons will be around 250+. What I really want is 500-600 magic armor and then hoard Frost Armor scrolls and use the spell as well.
4. Yeah the Pawn was my first pick, second will likely be Warlord or All Skilled Up depending on how much I want bartering.
5. Your DPS is going to be pretty shitty for the most part; Rogues can burst up to 2.5k... which almost no one can reach anyways. But if I can do 1k to a single target then that's fine.
As I mentioned earlier, my goal is to disrupt the backline with my tank/2H in most situations and let the ranged people deal with the enemy front line. Chances are the enemy front line will turn around and hit the two guys that just dove into the middle of their ranks.
Abilities will be far more efficient than auto attacks, so most of my damage is going to come from those.
